there's no antidote for irony you say

Inara Pey breaks down the various third-party viewers out there. One might wish she would have spent time reviewing the CoolSL viewer as well, but alas. It's still pretty comprehensive on a feature-by-feature comparison.

Why don't most YouTube players on the grid work now? Ask Damani. Some have now reverted and can play again, but generally, it's still a risk--it'll either work, or it won't, and only upgrading will solve it. But it's nice to finally have a why.

This one's more RL, but since many of us are geeks, and we do conventions now and again--it's indispensable for what to take, what to buy, and how to store it at the con. (This, by the way, is part one of this series, and this is part three.)

Art is architecture for Karim Rashid, but I find it very surreal that his buildings and structures look both vintage and futuristic at the same time. Nifty trick.

Along with Dusan Writer (who originally found this one), I completely and totally disagree with this article; Second Life is not disconnected from social media. It's rife on Blogger, Twitter, and Wordpress; you can tweet updates to your Twitter account while in Second Life, you can set the viewer to send you IM updates from other people or notices from stores to your email account...At this point there are text-only viewers for the grid and it's only a matter of time before someone makes a purely mobile viewer. It's very connected.

So what is this author complaining about? Mainly, that it's not hooked into Facebook. I could care less. The Facebook group hasn't updated? I'm perfectly fine with that.

Plus (and Tateru Nino pointed this out first), what is SL if not a social network? It's still not precisely a game, not like WoW, Runes, and 192% of everything Steam/Valve offers...it's only separate from the social network that comprises MySpace/Facebook/Twitter for virtue of the fact the article's author wants it to be.

There's another RL article out there saying current 3D technology could impair childrens' vision. What about adults? Our eyes are already trained, so to speak, so it just gives us eyestrain, not strabismus? Sort of reminds me of when computers and keyboards were introduced, and suddenly, all the office clerks were getting carpal tunnel from using computers...We are not our technologies, but wau, are we influenced by them.

Speaking of which, it wasn't just me that had a huge problem connecting with the internet yesterday and today--apparently Amazon went buggy, and might be still, and Second Life is being very crashtastic on its own. Of course, I have to build my brains out, because today is the last day I can make cart changes for Operation Squeegee...so of COURSE there are login problems!

I promise, my next entry will have pictures of at least my contribution to the event, and more about it. More then!